Impressionism
by CampionSayn
Summary: Sometimes, what appears to be is what it is. Sometimes, what appears to be is not that at all. Smoke can be sulfur; rivers can be washing machines; accidents can be experience, and a name can be friendship for life. Kurtty pseudo-flirtation/romance. Collective one-shots. Rating may rise.
1. Illusionists

Title: Impressionism  
Summary: Sometimes, what appears to be is what it is. Sometimes, what appears to be is not that at all. Smoke can be sulfur; rivers can be washing machines; accidents can be experience, and a name can be friendship for life. Kurtty pseudo-flirtation.  
Disclaimer: No money, no franchise ownership, no suing.  
Dedication: This was written for **bigtimelive**, the one and only person who made a live action Kurtty video over at Youtube. All of us realize that the pairing would be (is more or less) impossible in this universe…but since when has that ever stopped the creative process for an OTP? And I, myself, like impossible romance—within some semblance of reason. (Kurt _did_ laugh at the mention of Kitty at the end of **X2**, so it stands to reason that he _COULD_ have met her when she gave Xavier what he needed. I know it's a stretch, but it's possible.)

* * *

_-:-  
The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: tables can be clocks, faces, flowers.  
-Girl, Interrupted._

* * *

Kitty once went through the wall of a mental facility. It was an accident from around the time that her powers were manifesting and she was just pressing her hand against some building to tie a shoelace (_traitorous strip of binding thread and cheerful pink with yellow ladybugs imprinted at each end)_when some car horn blared around the end of the alley she was in and then she was suddenly toppled over on a plain white linoleum floor with bright florescent lights above.

It was a really big (freaking) deal, considering that she had only discovered her ability a week before, and also considering that the building was famous for housing young girls of all varieties of mental illness. She happened to fall right into the hall of the main ward where three young—one older than her, fourteen at the time, so maybe sixteen and still quite young for the onset of any mental break—girls who she would later realize had severe problems with recognizing what was reality and what was not. One of them just kind of smiled at her in what was meant to be a friendly way (_but unfortunately came off as a read between creepy and why-aren't-you-as-freaked-out-as-you-should-be_) while the other two hugged each other and assured in silent whispers to each other that they were both seeing the same thing—the doctors probably would believe them this time.

There had been a loud banging from around the corner that the hall lead to and Kitty had bashed her head into the wall before getting back out the way she came. Blood from the impact (_forehead skin against solid brownstone and wood siding did not go together_) would not be noticed until she got back to her house and after hyperventilating into a cushion, where the stain of her blood had soaked into her blue pillow (_two little black kittens that her mom had sewn in for her drenched in the red drops of body fluid_).

In hindsight, it gave her quite the ability to tell that what appeared to be was often misleading. That girl that had smiled at her was a simple ebony haired teen with blue eyes not too different from Kitty's and had looked as normal as they came, but had been bound in a straightjacket for reasons Kitty thought might have had merit to normal people, and those two other girls had been happy to realize that they had both seen the same impossible thing at once; they had thought they'd have proof for someone to believe that all of their fantasies might have been right for however long they had been locked up (_and wasn't that a kick in the head for Kitty to realize later; raising the hopes of disturbed girls and then having those hopes dashed when she left again_).

Perhaps that incident was the reason why, when Professor Xavier had her do him a favor, she didn't really react to seeing the man that looked like a big, blue demon. She just did her duty to the man in the wheelchair and nodded at the other mutant on her way back to the Institute (_and the mess that had been left for everyone to pitch in with cleaning up; her abilities useless for most of the chores, save for pulling bullets from the walls and putting in new glass windows_), like he was nothing special; just another person she may or may not see back at school as a teacher or just a guest the Professor might invite back after the confrontation Xavier needed her to get evidence for.

When Kitty did see him at the Institute and he spotted her on her way to breakfast a few days later and well after everyone had heard the news about Dr. Grey (_Kitty_ _standing barely at five feet in high socks and her jacket making her look even more like a stick figure near anyone else_), he surprised her with a fanged smile and a three-fingered wave from where he was speaking with Wolverine and Storm.

She smiled and waved back easily before disappearing through a wall so she could get a blueberry muffin before they were all gone.

Kurt has a bit of a problem

* * *

When he's first brought into the mansion. It's not that he's ungrateful for being offered room and board when he's not able to pay any money (okay, that's partly a lie and may God forgive him, but it's not _the_reason), but something much more grating.

He is not used to using laundry rooms and doing anything to clean his clothes other than standing at night in the middle of a river, rock in hand to pound out the stains he could see as best he could. When he found himself asking Storm what he was to do with his clothing (_those he'd worn for years, not the ones the Professor had given him—a whole closet full—to wander about the mansion while undergoing consideration of what he might be able to teach the students that didn't have to be language; Logan had jokingly suggested him being the art teacher and had caused Rogue sitting with them to choke on the tea she had been drinking_) after his first couple of nights in the room provided to him, she had blinked and told him where to find the laundry room. She'd told him where the soaps and laundry baskets were as well and sent him on his way as she was getting ready to teach her next class.

As he was conditioned to be weary of most things, he went to the laundry room later that evening while the students were either at dinner or scattered about in groups and single walks to do whatever teenagers did in their spare time; the laundry basket in his hands filled to the brim with his trench coat and clothes from life before the Institute and himself in a simple grey T-shirt and drawstring sweats, rosary twined in the loop of the bow that tightened the drawstring and his cross glinting from its place around his neck and just over the brim of his shirt. His feet made little echoed taps on the floor with each step he made until he got to the room Ororo had described; four washing machines and three dryers sitting in an alcove waiting for use.

Two other machines were clanging in their destined spaces, grooving and sloshing around the clothing of the little girl who could walk through walls; her figure atop the one making the most noise, looking bored and blinking at him the second he stepped into the light.

"Oh, hello," she greeted easily, giving Kurt a small smile that bellied no fear, merely curiosity in seeing him up close and his tail swishing back and forth on the floor of the hallway as he stepped in (_always cautious so he didn't strike a chord of fear in new acquaintances at first sight_) and set his laundry down next to one of the machines that weren't rumbling almost like they were giants with stomach problems.

"Hello," Kurt greeted back, fingers fiddling with each other as he stood, not knowing quite what to do with himself and the clothing he'd brought down, "I vas not avare that there vas anyone down here or I vould have come later."

"It's no problem," the girl smiled, feet waving back and forth on the edge of her seat and occasionally touching—going through—the metal, "I don't think I got your name a few nights ago, did I?"

"Kurt Vagner," the older mutant smiled, teeth not quite so scary in the ultra white lighting of the room that seemed a different planet, so far away from everything else that it was (_almost a different universe, given that the girl hadn't shrieked at the sight of him and that despite the noise caused by the machines, it was peacefully calm all the way down the long halls that both connected to the elevators to upstairs and the tapered off halls towards Cerebro or the med lab or the Danger Room he'd been shown to by Logan_) and leaving him less drawn in than if he hadn't seen the girl before, "But in the Munich circus I vas known as the Great Nightcrawler."

She smiled even more and almost laughed outright at how he straightened up and his chest puffed up at his title (perhaps he didn't get to say that very much?) that made him seem displaced in such a common place as a laundry room. She leaned a little forward, wrists seen as very thin in the light as her palms braced the metal and he couldn't stop the thought from entering his head as one of her hands stuck out in front of her for him to take and shake in proper introduction, '_Mein Gott, she has tiny little bones_…'

"Kitty Pryde," she said, shaking his hand and then dropping off of the washing machine when it ceased wiggling under her and a button at the top most corner of it beeped and flashed twice, "No special title."

She let go if his hand and he was surprised to be disappointed at missing the warmth when she turned back to the machine and opened the hatch on top, starting to unload her own laundry and fold them (_they were still wet and he could see the moisture of the cold water on her fingers when she crossed the arms of a black sweater and put it atop one of the machines not in use; leaving him with the impression that the cold of the liquid would leave her joints stiff by the time she was done; not unusual but he never liked to see anyone uncomfortable_). Each piece of clothing smelled like a specialized blend of dampness, cleaning detergent and some sort of vanilla extract that seemed out of place until he realized it wasn't coming from the laundry, it was coming off of her (_either it was a very cheap perfume or the residue of some sort of body wash from when she bathed_).

Going with the flow and not wanting to remain in silence for long, Kurt took up his own laundry, opening up the hatch of another machine on the other side of the one Kitty was using as a makeshift table to hold her folded laundry (_mostly shirts so far, with pants being carried over to one of the dryers and spinning around and around with some of her underclothes as well; which he didn't pay attention to…not at all_) and spoke over the noise of the clanging still going on in one of the other machines, "No special title to anyone in this school? I can't believe that. Everyone has their own private nickname, at the very least, ja?"

She watched (_her blue eyes were a grand contrast to his golden orbs, but she liked them from where she stood; it went well with his indigo skin in her opinion—much better than if he had plain brown or green eyes, anyway_) Kurt stuff his large trench coat in with pants and tattered shirt, all looking makeshift and too old to put on 'fast spin' like he did and with a lot more softener and dry bar Tide, but it was his clothing and she wouldn't comment; he probably knew how to take care of his own clothing, "Well, despite the whole walk-through-walls thing I have going for me, I am actually quite boring. No need to give someone a more exciting name when they're the vanilla in an ice cream shop of Rocky Road and Cherie Garcia and so on."

Kurt gently set the lid to his machine shut, water dribbling inside immediately at that and making him raise it, turn it off, lower it, turn it on and so forth a couple of times (Kitty did giggle at that, until he set it down), before he got the idea and blushed at his own embarrassing situation, bamfing out of existence and then bamfing back atop his machine, looking innocent and not mortified at all in front of the teen girl still folding her clothes, just with a kind smile, "Every person in the vorld is unique. Don't your friends call you anything special? A pet name, a codename, something?"

She shook her head and waved off the smell of smoke and brimstone that always came with his teleportation, her hands finished with her clothing and working to pull her back to where she had been when he entered (_the effort allowed him to count most of the tendons leading from her wrist to her knuckles to her fingers and enjoy seeing how the tips of her fingers turned rosy under pressure_). She made a little hollow clang when she took her seat and he was looking sideways at her like they were the same age (_he hadn't felt so familiar with anyone since the Munich circus and then again with Storm; it was not unwelcome, but still strange…in a really nice way_); the situation becoming obvious that she intended, possibly, to wait with him for his laundry to finish while she still waited for her own.

She hummed like she was thinking, eyes looking over the tattoos she could see on his face and neck and arms ('_Tough guy, I'll bet_.'), before shrugging her shoulders and tapping her fingers on the machine that separated the both of them from touching wet clothes or each other, "Well, I told you that I am quite boring."

"You did not scream when you first saw me a couple days ago," he counted off in invisible numbers plucked from the air like chicken scratch in bad schooling, "You easily helped Herr Xavier obtain documents to show the president that not all mutants are bad and not all humans are good, and you are sitting here with a former circus acrobat while I attempt to do my own laundry for the first time using something more futuristic than smooth rocks by a river in a country across the sea. That is not boring…Katzchen."

Kurt would later in the evening (_after Kitty got used to his pet name for her and after the washing machine he'd been using spat out bubbles and his ruined clothing in droves_) realize that he could not just toss laundry in a washing machine, press a few buttons, add whatever to the mix and hope for the best.

He would also realize that when someone like Kitty Pryde says she is boring, that it isn't so. If she was boring, she wouldn't have turned out to be the best friend he would make in his years following their first and second meeting, after he was made into the school's history teacher and after she asked him if Shadowcat would be a good codename when she joined ranks in the X-Men.

A girl who can appreciate something for what it does not appear to be is _never _boring.


	2. Everyone Loves the Circus

I just can't help myself. I find a door and walk through it and then when I close it I have to open it again and again and again. As such, from now on this isn't just a one-shot, it is a collective of one-shots. Some might be connected and some might not, but really isn't that okay? This is my specialty, after all.

This particular shot is a What If… _Kitty had 'met' Kurt just after her powers had emerged and he was still in the circus in Munich. AU of course._

* * *

_-:-  
Your absence has gone through me  
Like thread through a needle  
Everything I do is stitched with its color.  
-W.S. Merwin._

* * *

**Everyone Loves the Circus**-:-

There was this tiny little girl among a thousand faces that always came into the circus to watch him perform in the winters of Munich.

He spotted her by accident; looking not at his acts and not gasping as all the other children and even the adults around her did when he made defying flips in the air and then landed back on the platform after a disappearance in black smoke. She was looking at him not with inspired terror of his form or his performance, but with this odd, sad little look that almost broke his heart by the end of his act when he took his bows and all the people around were cheering (_German, French, Swedish, Yiddish, even a little British and American_) but she was actually crying a little before he lost sight of her and he had to get back behind the curtains, a black puff of his smoke leaving the crowd gasping as the ring master went on to introduce the next act (**clowns** of all things to end the show with; just because they always threw the children candy).

It didn't occur to him that he would see that crying face again…

The circus was leaving, packing up every animal and string of beads; the single wires for the flying ballet troupe, all the expensive makeup and wardrobe for the dancing girls; the carts that produced cotton candy or fresh buttered popcorn and, but of course, Kurt's own property for his high flying activities. All the workers were laughing about the previous night's events and then there had been a flickered cry out-out-out of the tent that sounded like none of the circus folk, but one of the town's people yelling about ghosts and poltergeists.

_("You know, the first time I saw you, I had this weird idea that you owned the ocean."_

_"Vhat?"_

_Kitty waved her hand in front of her face and continued to walk—phase—through the water in the pond out in the front of the Institute. Despite not having gotten wet so far—looking for those water weeds Ororo had asked her to get out of there before they started strangling her precious lilies—in the last two hours, her rugged jeans were folded up and snug above both of her knees, giving Kurt a little show of pale skin and pinking goosebumps. She yanked out another ugly, bourbon colored weed hiding near her left big toe and tossed it onto the grass, in the opposite direction of Kurt._

_"I was twelve and you, at the time, looked like this mythological being sent from heaven to give me hope. You were a big blue elf and I was way into Irish fairy stories at the time; like every other normal girl that age," she went on when Kurt continued to watch her like a big feline and his tail tapped the ground behind him impatiently, "I thought if you were that blue and flew through the air like it was nothing, then you must live underwater during the day and entertained an audience at night to please yourself."_

_"That is… Very cute, Katzchen." He chortled, falling back on the grass and earning himself a piece of slimy water weed in the face.)_

Most of the circus staff paid the noise no mind. It was Munich after all and they heard the ramblings of frightened town's people confusing the sight of a mutant for the sight of a demon or some otherworld being come to lead them to death and eternity. Everyone else went back to hurrying about to get out of town and get onto the next appointed city; Kurt teleported to the opening in the very top of the Big Tent.

He didn't see anything at first, other than a truck smacked against a telephone pole, the back of the vehicle spilling fruits and vegetables onto the ground as the driver tried to catch his breath leaning against his car door, his assistant (his son from the look of him, smaller and looking panicked) looking up and down the road for something. His head and eyes kept surveying the ditch and around other cars as if he thought they'd hit something…

Then he saw the girl again. That tiny little girl walking slowly through the small crowd of people that were gathering; her hands were stuffed into her too-big winter coat and her brown hair was fly-away to poorly cover up the terror in her eyes that Kurt didn't understand until his heart almost stopped at seeing her duck into a nearby alley and walk _through_ a locked gate wooden fence. She had seemed to brace before her face smacked against the wood, but then Kurt had literally observed her body flush against the solid and morph into it before disappearing altogether from his sight.

Kurt hadn't known what he was doing when he teleported to the fence and stood along the top of it like some large cat, but he felt like he just had to see that he wasn't dreaming—that she wasn't a figment of his imagination.

He missed her as she walked through the wall of what, years and years later, he would learn to have been the hotel her parents and she were staying in before heading on to France and then England and then home to Illinois. Kurt blinked into the emptiness of the dark alley for a good five minutes at nothing but a few black rats scurrying into a drainpipe and little drops of water (_snow was melting off of an overhanging roof because someone's heat was turned up to well above a hundred degrees in preparation for a lover coming to visit_) landing into an ever growing puddle that he couldn't see had shoe impression in the mud within but not without.


	3. Alcohol and Baking Sugar

Okay, okay, okay, I finally got this out and it may seem a little odd at first, but it will be worth it; swear!

* * *

_-:-  
__Boy, it doesn't take much to make you content. Avert one minor disaster, and you can't get that goofy grin off your face.  
-Medium._

* * *

**Alcohol and Baking Sugar**-:-

There are exceedingly bad situations and then there is just plain bad luck.

This situation, as it stood, was sitting in a drafty, damp, horrific place between those two options. Like a hummingbird's egg sitting on the very top of a cliff while having to worry about two traps Wile E. Coyote set up at five feet on either side that consisted of a lot of sharp knives and dynamite. That kind of bad just didn't come around that often.

But it had on a breezy Tuesday just before the first snowfall in October.

Kitty had been shot in a battle with the Brotherhood. This didn't usually happen, but she hadn't seen it coming and had been busy giving Bobby a heads up at the time, so nobody was giving her a terribly hard time about it. It wasn't like it was to a vital area, either, just a flesh wound along her upper left arm and near her hip.

The downside of this, however, was that when she was in pain, it kind of opened up a huge probability for her to phase by accident if someone spooked her or something equally unexpected.

Sitting in her room and changing out of her clothes; fine. She had winced a couple times and her feet had sunk a few inches into the wooden floor, but she had caught herself long enough to get to her bathroom and shut the door. Leaning on the edge of her tub, slipping out of her underwear and bra so she could apply alcohol and gauze to her injuries; very little problem. Her hand had phased into the tub's lining and she'd almost fallen so her head bashed against the sink she was using as the work area to hold her cleaning supplies, but it had been all good until she had the bandages on and all the lot of the first aid put away.

A sneeze was what did her in as it sent an uncomfortable spring of pain to her injured areas and she'd fallen through the floor (her own and the three others) before she'd finally gone back to solid and found a spray of water cascading down through her hair and making channels along the rest of her body. Her own very _naked_ body that wasn't alone in someone else's shower when she sputtered at the water in her face before turning around to find an equally wet and naked Kurt. His big yellow eyes looked like a cross between surprised and trying to focus on the situation at hand (_no shampoo in his hair, but he had smelled of Eternity for men and there was a little soap along his arm and leg muscles_) as Kitty's eyes took on the same edge and her mouth dropped at the sight of him.

A few seconds ticked by to make sure neither one of them were hallucinating, but then it sped up in a rather violent fashion and both of them were speaking words that certainly didn't retain the understanding of the English language while they both tried to GET THE HELL OUT of the shower and cover up very much like most of the paintings of Adam and Eve after being banished from Heaven. Kitty kept repeating, "I am so, so sorry Kurt, really, it was an accident, I swear to God" and Kurt kept repeating something German and tripped out of the shower to land on the floor as his tail slapped the wall until it found what he was looking for and snatched the two towels from the rack near the door. Kurt was quick to wrap one around his middle (_never mind still being on the floor in a very bad position as he looked back over to Kitty and then swiftly shut his eyes like he would be smote by Wolverine if he walked in_) and his tail passed the other towel to Kitty—who gratefully accepted and wrapped it around herself.

She might have been more careful when she covered up, though, because the towel tore the gauze from the injury at her hip and Kurt only had enough time to hear the girl hiss before she ended up phasing through Kurt's shower stall floor and down to the floor below. The room below Kurt's happening to be the kitchen where a small cluster of the younger students happened to be learning how to make cookies with Ororo while Logan stood at the back in case any of them got to be too much for the Weather Witch.

Kurt, still on his bathroom floor, even without his exceptional hearing, _could_ have heard Kitty and the children screaming from down in the _Danger Room_ five seconds later.

Being who he was, Kurt Wagner (embarrassed or not) quickly bamfed down to the kitchen to find Kitty on top of the island countertop, towel tight in her hands, bandaging gauze on her arm torn off and some blood dripping from the wound again, her entire figure also covered in flour and fine powdered sugar, her right foot inside a shining metal bowel filled with already battered eggs, brown sugar, vanilla extract and butter.

Kurt tilted his head to find the small children that had been screaming staring at him, but he quickly decided that Kitty's embarrassment (_her face was so red with humiliation and she looked like she was about to cry_) took precedent. Hand lightly landing on her uninjured shoulder, he spoke lowly in her ear, "Easy, Katzchen, we'll go back to my room to clean up."

They both disappeared in a cloud of black smoke that smelled horrible, but that also quickly mixed with some powder that burst off of Kitty, so it was almost pretty to some of the kids.

The adults hesitated only briefly before the oven dinged with the cookies that had been put in earlier. Ororo pacified the children with the cookies, telling them that they would continue after she and Logan had cleaned up the mess and that they could go to the Rec. Room until they were called back. It was a little difficult for the woman to do so over the sound of Logan laughing until he was doubled over and fell off of the chair he'd been sitting in, but she'd managed.

* * *

Sugar and flour inside of an open flesh wound burned like acid.

Kurt's bathroom didn't come with a tub, but he had eased out of that fact by setting the toilet lid down and letting Kitty sit there as he took out the first aid kit from under his sink and just gently started to remove the stains of baking products from her injuries with alcohol swabs; his deep blue skin a grand (if not un-beautiful) contrast to her usually pale figure that was sporting red from the tips of her shoulders all the way up to her hairline. She hadn't said a word since they'd gotten back to his bathroom, but no words needed to be said, not really, as her eyes kept painting pictures in his mind of being quite sorry for seeing him in the privacy of the running shower and wishing she could erase the image of herself (_much shorter than him, thin as sparrow bones and different in every aspect possible_) in front of him under water drops like rain.

He could still smell the cooking ingredients on her foot (_funny how he'd never thought unbaked ingredients could be appetizing until that moment in the quiet bathroom with the water from his shower still dripping as he hadn't paid attention to turn it off; the brown sugar and egg were turning hard on the skin of all of Kitty's toes and the entire underside that had left little tracks when they'd bamfed back into existence from the kitchen_) and allowed a toothy smile as he patted her on the top of her head.

"No fear, Katzchen," Kurt soothed, his other hand lightly preventing her free hand from moving to pick at the white powder along her shoulder wound, "It's not as though children so young vill care about a girl falling through the ceiling as long as they still get their cookies."

"Just remind me," Kitty finally spoke, eyes tracing the lining of some of his markings so she wouldn't have to look at that smile that would only make her blush until it literally hurt, "The next time someone shoots me, to get a numbing agent right afterwards. Being alert and walking around is not worth all of this…stuff."

He snorted at the hand motion between the two of them, but it wasn't so unattractive with the sound of running water as background noise.

Swabbing the last of the flour and sugar from her shoulder wound—some blood being lifted with the swab of white cotton he was using as well—Kurt grabbed, unwrapped and applied a pair of bandages he'd gotten from Jubilee that featured characters from the Lion King. It was far less cumbersome than straight out using gauze, so Kitty sucked up any humiliating feelings of carrying around Simba and Nala in print on her shoulder. It was better than carrying around something cliché like Beauty and the Beast, anyway.

Heaven forbid something like _that_ happen.

Kurt lightly moved the towel covering up the part of her hip that was bleeding again and set to work on that as Kitty finally felt her blush going down. The red was no longer like a fire hydrant, but more along the lines of pina colada in a frosted glass and far less telling of the situation. She could almost forget entirely that she was being looked over by the same tall German that she had also seen naked fifteen minutes ago.


End file.
